A weekly catch up on things we’ve found interesting over the past week.

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UNIC (Union Internationale des Cinémas, or, International Union of Cinemas) has released their brochure “European Cinema: Facts and Figures”, and it seems it’s good news all around! Ticket sales in 2017 show that European cinema goers are in no hurry to abandon the hobby. The 1.34 billion admissions in 2017 are up a total of 2.5% from 2016, with the box office coming in at €8.6 billion (up 1.8% since 2016).

The effect these admissions continue to have on the industry is equally positive.

“Europe is a key building block of an increasingly connected and international

industry, representing a quarter of the global theatrical market for films” UNIC

UNIC itself, as a trade association, certainly seems to be taking much pride in their work of promoting and representing the cinema operators, boasting 40 500 screens across 37 EU territories. The approach of personalised marketing is cited as a reason UNIC believes the EU film industry is thriving, while their data analytics predict it will continue to increase by 10% – 20% if implemented effectively.

When it comes to box office vs home entertainment revenue, going to the cinema still accounts for most of the film industry’s revenye, (61%in 2016). It will be interesting to see whether the battle of personalised marketing, which both home cinema and streaming are heavily invested in, will result in a significant shift.

Other articles of note

Data analytics is the new black. It seems like if you’re serious about marketing in the film and TV industry, you’re going to have to go for the personalised approach. We’ve covered Netflix’ entire website dedicated to their new department, and above you can read about UNIC citing analytics for one of the reasons why admissions and box office figures soared in the EU territories in 2017.

Viacom seeks to use the fragmentation of audience’s attention to their advantage. Their solution seems to be leaning heavily on the area of experiential marketing, citing a study that found that 70% of the youth audiences choose to watch content that they find postable or shareable on social media.

Not exactly the result Disney was expecting… It’s a whopping 46% below the “Rogue One” holiday release, but Disney reps say they’re not worried about the long term box office revenue for the film. Maybe it’s the Memorial Day release slot? Because all three of the other Disney Star Wars films released in the December slot certainly grossed huge amounts at the box office. The recently announced Bobba Fett spin off hasn’t got a release date yet, so perhaps they’ll consider keeping that one out of the Memorial Weekend as well, and aiming it for the December release slot.

In more marketing news, Facebook are sharing how media agencies use research and analytics to connect their users with the content that’s most personal to them. The event came in the form of a seminar, hosted on the Facebook Business platform. One of the headlines related to how budgets for TV advertising are 17 times larger than that of digital advertising, while the reach of TV is only 4 times that of digital platforms. The most effective cross channel combination is shown to be a combination of TV and Facebook.